BT on Mumia Abu-Jamal Campaign

Running Dogs for the Reformist Left

Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky wrote in 1929: “The greatest honor for a genuine revolutionist today is to remain a ‘sectarian’ of revolutionary Marxism in the eyes of Philistines, whimperers and superficial thinkers” (“Once Again on Brandler-Thalheimer,” June 1929). In this spirit, we take up a June 9 letter to Workers Vanguard, “On Spartacist Sectarianism and Mumia’s Defense,” by the dubious, misnamed International Bolshevik Tendency (BT). The letter, posted on the BT’s Web site, unwittingly underlines Trotsky’s point.

This BT screed, addressed to Workers Vanguard in response to our article “Protests Demand: Free Mumia Now!” (WV No. 914, 9 May), is in fact written for the hard core of hostile liberals and reformists who despise the Marxist politics and class-struggle defense program put forward by the Spartacist League and Partisan Defense Committee in the fight for Mumia’s freedom. Thus, the BT’s letter drops even its ritual paper objections to the reformists’ call for a “new trial” for Mumia, i.e., the falsehood that this fighter against black oppression, an innocent man subjected to a massive state frame-up, can get justice from the capitalist courts that have consigned him to death row. Such appeals to the “good offices” of the bourgeois state are in counterposition to the independent mobilization of the working class and oppressed to free Mumia.

After denouncing the WV article as being “as cynical as it is dishonest,” the BT makes much of our supposed “aversion to united-front activity” and “aversion to working seriously with other leftists in Mumia’s defense.” Nothing new from the BT there. We have previously published an exchange with the BT (see “Dubious BT’s ‘United Front’ Fraud—The Fight for Class-Struggle Defense of Mumia Abu-Jamal,” WV No. 903, 23 November 2007), which exhaustively dealt (yet again) with similar charges of “sectarianism” and the purpose they serve. Given the BT’s self-indictment in this latest communiqué, it is worth replying again.

To begin, we will quote in full the paragraph from the WV No. 914 article, to which the BT objected and from which it only selectively quoted by omitting the first and last sentences:

“While the reformist left has sought to avoid our united-front protests like the plague, the dubious International Bolshevik Tendency (BT) has sought to be the microbe that poisons the labor-centered mass protest necessary to free Mumia. Having become involved in the united-front protests in Toronto and London, the BT then promoted protests in cities where we do not have active branches: Dublin, Ireland; Cologne, Germany; and Vienna, Austria. These three Potemkin-village ‘protests’ drew a combined total of no more than 35 people. The Dublin ‘rally’ featured a speaker from the anarchist Workers Solidarity Movement [WSM] who questioned Mumia’s innocence without a peep in response from the BT. Meanwhile, BT supporters showed up at the April 19 Oakland united-front protest and, while claiming to support the slogans of the protest, refused to endorse it. What gives?”

The BT admits in its June 9 missive: “Although we missed it at the time, the representative of the Workers Solidarity Movement who spoke in Dublin apparently did call into question Mumia’s innocence. We would note that he takes the view that leftists should defend Mumia nonetheless.” At a rally that peaked at 16 people, it would seem to be virtually impossible to “miss” such a statement. Moreover, in questioning Mumia’s innocence, the WSM speaker echoed what is the stock in trade of liberal false “friends” of Mumia who see his frame-up as simply an aberration and a stain on American “justice” and “democracy.” These include the likes of David Lindorff, author of the book Killing Time: An Investigation Into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, which declares, “I’m not convinced that Mumia Abu-Jamal was simply an innocent bystander” and grotesquely suggests that Mumia may have shot Officer Faulkner. Lindorff was embraced by much of the reformist left, as he too called for a “new trial” for Mumia. (See “David Lindorff, Michael Schiffmann: Undermining Mumia’s Fight for Freedom,” WV No. 892, 11 May 2007.) As to their refusal to endorse the Oakland protest, the BT’s letter is mum.

The BT decries the WV article, claiming it “maliciously asserts” that the BT “‘cares nothing about black oppression’.” Again, we print in full the paragraph in WV to which the BT refers:

“We can only guess why an organization that cares nothing about black oppression would get involved in Mumia’s case. What we do know is that the BT—an organization led by the twisted sociopath Bill Logan, who was expelled from our tendency in 1979 for crimes ‘against communist morality and its substrate elementary human decency’—has always pursued an unnatural and hostile obsession with our organization. Insofar as they have gotten involved in Mumia’s case, it has been to conciliate the reformists’ calls for a ‘new trial’ while attacking the PDC and SL as ‘sectarian’ as we have fought to reverse the demobilization of Mumia’s supporters.”

While the BT claims this is malicious, its silence on our indictment of their indifference to black oppression and their revolting leader Logan is enough to make our case.

Since its inception in the early 1980s as a clot of embittered ex-members of our organization, the BT has been defined by its sneering contempt for the fight for black freedom. The BT, for instance, generally absented itself from the mass united-front labor/black mobilizations to stop fascist terror, which were built by the SL and PDC. But the BT did spill a lot of ink denouncing us for abandoning trade-union work in favor of “community organizing” and “accommodating backward consciousness” when we initiated the Labor Black Leagues, which are linked to the SL.

When in 1985 Philadelphia cops under Democratic mayor Wilson Goode, working in collusion with the FBI, bombed the MOVE commune, killing eleven people and incinerating an entire black neighborhood, the BT could not choke out a word of protest. Rather, the BT used the occasion of a New York meeting called by the Spartacist League in solidarity with the victims of this racist atrocity to attack the SL for not polemicizing against the MOVE victims! Notably, under the “Black Question” heading of the subject index for the BT’s newspaper 1917, their Web site lists a total of fivearticles (the last one in 1993), while 47 articles are listed under “Spartacist League.”

Ever since the SL and PDC took up Mumia’s case in 1987, we have fought to make the fight for Mumia’s freedom a cause within the workers movement and left. For its part, the BT did not muster a single article on Mumia until 1996, and their first piece was to denounce us for “sectarianism.” Thus, the BT’s “contribution” in 1995 to Mumia’s case, when mass protests helped stay the executioner’s hand after a death warrant was signed, was to appear in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. A 16 June 1995 article by this house organ of U.S. finance capital retailed the BT’s slanders of the Spartacist League as a deranged “cult” in order to smear the efforts of the PDC and others on Mumia’s behalf. As we wrote in the exchange with the BT in WV No. 903, “The Wall Street Journal’s intent was transparent enough. How and why the minuscule BT was readily wielded as a tool for the Wall Street Journal is not.”

The BT is not only wretched on the question of black oppression in the U.S., but equally so on other questions of special oppression in other countries where it operates. Thus, its gross Anglo-chauvinist position opposing independence for Quebec in Canada. As we wrote in the article further exposing the BT over Quebec, “Bolshevik Tendency: Kneeling Before the Body of General Wolfe on the Plains of Abraham” (WV No. 827, 28 May 2004): “From Canada to Germany, inasmuch as the BT raises political questions, it reflects the ‘values’ of the ruling class as refracted through its own national social democracy.” And of course this means both abasement before and an opening into the milieu of the pathetic “left” loyalists to that social democracy or, in the U.S., of reformists addicted to giving some “fight the right” version of support to the bourgeois Democratic Party in the U.S.

It is hardly an accident that Logan is “disappeared” entirely from the BT’s June 9 letter. But the voluminous documentary evidence against this sick and sadistic individual, found to be a “proven, massive liar and a sexual sociopath who manipulated the private lives of comrades for reasons of power politics and his own aberrant appetites and compulsions in the guise of Marxism” at the time of his 1979 expulsion from our organization, cannot be airbrushed away by the BT school of falsification. Logan—who tried to force a young woman comrade to have an abortion and when that failed, pressured her to put her child in a foster home—now offers his services as a “counsellor” and “celebrant,” including with a Web site replete with sample texts for a “funeral for a baby.” This leader of a “Bolshevik” organization also appears on a New Zealand government “career services” Web site (see box on this page).

The recently published ICL bulletin, The Logan Dossier, further augments our documentation on this sick puppy. As we noted in the preface to The Logan Dossier (reprinted in WV No. 900, 12 October 2007): “In publishing the documentary record of the Logan trial, we aim to make clear to a new generation of leftists that the likes of Logan have no place in the workers movement, to expose his opportunist ‘Bolshevik’ Tendency for the suspect outfit it is and to demolish its lying smears and slanders against our party.”

Pursuing Unity with Reformists, Slander Against Revolutionists

The main political features of the BT’s mating call to the reformists are carried significantly further rightward with its new “open letter.” Not only is it bereft of any criticism of the liberals and reformists, but it purges the Leninist tactic of the united front of any hint of communism while reviving the Stalinist, class-collaborationist “united front” as a lowest-common-denominator political non-aggression pact; it makes concrete the BT’s call for “regroupment” with the remnants of anti-Soviet, left social democrats based on the twin pillars of Stalinophobia and Spartacist-baiting.

In order to serve these purposes, the BT has to brazenly falsify history, including very recent history. Curiously, considering their practice of trumpeting every other event they have ever claimed credit for initiating, the BT’s Web site has no photos or reports on the April 19 demonstration in Toronto. The simple reason is that the photos of the demonstration show that who actually built and led the united-front demonstration in Toronto on April 19 was the Partisan Defense Committee and our Canadian comrades of the Trotskyist League/Ligue Trotskyste.

The BT letter claims: “Yet while nominally endorsing the event, members of the TL/PDC adamantly refused to participate in any sort of joint activity to build it.” In fact, at a March 28 emergency protest in Toronto, the day after the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Mumia’s frame-up conviction, the PDC put out the call for a united-front demonstration on April 26. The BT refused to endorse. Instead, they popped up a week or so later with a new “committee”—notably including “new trial” advocates like Socialist Action in Canada—calling for a protest on April 19. Because we are for the mobilization of the largest forces to fight for Mumia’s freedom, the PDC shifted our united-front protest to the same date.

The BT coyly notes: “The TL/PDC’s offer to provide a sound system was accepted, and a list of speakers for the rally agreed upon.” Bluntly put, in addition to building the April 19 demonstration, including through winning the endorsement and participation of trade unions, we provided the sound system and mobilized most of the speakers. Moreover, a representative of our Canadian section chaired the rally (while a speaker from the BT’s “committee” introduced a handful of speakers in the middle of the rally).

So, what’s the beef? According to the BT’s letter, there was our “flat refusal to distribute the common united-front poster—despite the fact that the text had been amended to meet concerns they had raised regarding a minor technicality. The TL/PDC produced its own poster for the Toronto demonstration….” Yes we did! We produced our own propaganda for the protest, powerfully motivating Mumia’s case to the working class and laying out the programmatic issues that are central to fighting for his freedom.

In fact, the real “crime” of our comrades in the eyes of the BT is contained in the concluding paragraph of its revealing letter:

“The demonstration, which drew more than 150 people, was a success, although the sectarianism exhibited by the TL toward various participating organizations was not particularly useful. At various points during and after the demonstration, several of your supporters crowded around our literature table shouting apolitical abuse and acting in a generally obnoxious manner. The behavior of the TL supporters, which was remarked on by many who attended the rally, is unfortunately all too familiar. As we have observed in the past, this is particularly regrettable given the very important contributions the PDC has made to Mumia’s defense.”

To the BT, the “united front” is synonymous with opportunist unity with the reformists and disappearing any political differences with them. Even as it ludicrously accuses us of a “desire to avoid substantive political discussion,” the BT whines about our “unfortunately all too familiar” political combat with other organizations, including the BT, at the united-front protest.

Such political combat is from the arsenal of Leninism, expressed in the united-front call, “march separately, strike together.” As we explained in the pamphlet On the United Front: “The tactic of the UF [united front] should never be seen as a cessation of political struggle, as a non-aggression pact or mutual amnesty with other tendencies. The CI [Communist International] slogan for the UF—‘freedom of criticism, unity in action’—anticipated that the UF would sharpen the political struggle and exacerbate hostilities between communist and non-communist leaderships.”

In its “open letter,” the BT doesn’t say just who might have “remarked” upon our “unfortunate” Leninism. Could it be the BT’s Socialist Action bloc partners, players in the hastily constituted “committee” for the April 19 demonstration? The U.S. affiliate of this abjectly reformist group—initiators of the San Francisco Mobilization to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal (aka “MOBE”), led by Socialist Action honcho Jeff Mackler—refused to endorse the Oakland mobilization initiated by the PDC and Labor Black League for Social Defense, citing our communist criticism of Socialist Action and others as the reason.

That the ever-obliging BT does not breathe a word of criticism against the reformist left in its letter is a conscious “unity” pitch. To make this crystal-clear, the BT opines that the Spartacists “have on occasion come very close to overtly rejecting the very idea of joint activity with other leftists.” The BT continues:

“This was particularly evident in your coverage of last October’s New York launch of Bryan Palmer’s biography of James P. Cannon, an event the SL co-sponsored with the IBT and four other groups. You specifically criticized a statement by one of our comrades at the meeting that members of different political tendencies should work together on particular issues where there is significant agreement, and took umbrage at the suggestion that the political discussion that would inevitably ensue could open the door to regroupment.”

Our article on the Palmer event (“Defending the Legacy of James P. Cannon,” WV No. 903, 23 November 2007), an event at which sales of The Logan Dossier were brisk, did not oh-so-politely “take umbrage,” but rather forthrightly stated that:

“We took issue with Palmer’s call at the end of his presentation for ‘revolutionary regroupment’ among leftists, a sentiment echoed by the BT and Solidarity. Regroupment generally results from big changes in the objective situation, usually victories, and involves a process of splits and fusions. The Bolshevik Revolution (October 1917), toward the end of the terrible world war, impelled hundreds of thousands of former left social democrats, anarchists and syndicalists (Cannon among them) to re-examine their political programs, laying the basis for the founding of the Third (Communist) International and the construction of Communist parties around the world.

“Calls for regroupment are hollow in this period of deep reaction, shaped above all by the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991-92, a world-historic defeat for the working class. While the bulk of the left internationally either hailed or abetted this defeat, we Spartacists fought to the end against the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet degenerated workers state and the deformed workers states of East and Central Europe.”

We further noted that the BT’s Tom Riley “was appealing for ‘unity’ to an audience that consisted largely of groups that share the BT’s crass Stalinophobic appetites. For our part, we find such smarmy appeals for ‘unity’ grotesque coming from a group whose history consists of one provocation after another against us, a group that has dedicated itself to our destruction. Bill Logan’s BT is the antithesis of Cannon’s Leninist legacy.”

The BT’s June 9 letter affirms the point we made about its Stalinophobic appetites when it repeats its “criticism of the SL’s salute to Yuri Andropov, the butcher of the Hungarian workers’ revolution of 1956.” It is hardly a slip of the pen when the BT refers to Hungary as a “workers revolution” as opposed to a proletarian political revolution. The 1956 Hungary uprising was led by pro-socialist workers against the ruling Stalinist bureaucracy and in defense of the workers state. As Trotskyists, we supported the Hungarian workers and opposed their suppression by the Kremlin Stalinists.

Nor is it an accident that the BT was horrified by our refusal to bend with the winds of Cold War II, including our jocular dubbing as the “Yuri Andropov Brigade” a busload of sympathizers and ex-members going to Washington, D.C. in 1982 to participate in a labor/black mobilization against the Ku Klux Klan that flew in the face of Reagan reaction. Nor was it an accident that the BT landed in the camp of the pro-imperialist reformists when it later renounced our call, “Hail Red Army in Afghanistan!” when the Soviet Union intervened in that country on behalf of elementary human progress and in defense of its southern borders. These are all BT admission tickets to the anti-Soviet, anti-Spartacist reformist swamp, laced with the BT’s obsessive hatred for and very dubious machinations against our organization.

At every demonstration for Mumia’s freedom, our comrades argued communist politics, seeking to link the capitalist frame-up of this courageous “voice of the voiceless” to the imperialists’ racist “war on terror,” the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, and raising the urgent need for the unconditional military defense of the deformed workers states of China, Cuba, North Korea and Vietnam. These positions necessarily cut against those of anti-Communist social democrats like Socialist Action and the BT itself. In retaliation, the reformists’ invective against us, augmented by their dubious BT quislings, is redolent of the vicious red-baiting visited upon Cannon’s International Labor Defense, defense arm of the early Communist Party, during the course of the fight to free anarchist workers Sacco and Vanzetti (see “Lessons of the Fight to Free Sacco and Vanzetti,” WV Nos. 897 and 898, 31 August and 14 September 2007).

We turn again to comrade Trotsky’s work cited at the beginning of this article: “We are now in the period of principled self-clarification and merciless demarcation from opportunists and muddlers. This is the only avenue to the highway of revolution.” As to the BT’s road: it is more provocateur than political opponent and as such it is open to anyone’s bidding. Its lies and slanders are the weapons of choice for a bitter and vicious gang of renegades. Its purpose is to give ammunition to the forces arrayed against us. Caveat emptor!